


we sailed across the sun

by jewishmccoy



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Antisemitism, Asexual Character, Canon Jewish Character, Depression, F/F, Homophobia, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, Jewish Character, M/M, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Surfing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-11-09 05:49:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11098206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jewishmccoy/pseuds/jewishmccoy
Summary: Jim is sixteen when he formally meets McCoy, and it’s because McCoy steals a wave right out from under him like a jackass.“Do you have eyes?” He yells at McCoy. “I was on the inside!”“Sorry, man,” McCoy yells back, “You were so slow I figured you were asleep!”Otherwise known as the Star Trek surfer-au you never knew you wanted.





	1. trained myself to give up on the past

**Author's Note:**

> This is a self-indulgent surfing AU I wrote for fun. This fic has an almost exclusively Jewish cast of characters—Kirk, Bones, Spock, Uhura, and Chekov are all Jewish. Kirk and Chekov have both been consistently played by Jewish actors, so this isn’t my fanon interpretation of them. Spock of course is explicitly Jewish. I have a problem with the severe deficit of Jewish Star Trek fics, so this is my contribution to remedy that. Although the characters are young in parts of this fic, there are no underage sexual situations at all.

Jim’s father dies in a big-wave competition, surfing Mavericks. In some ways, though, it’s like he never left. His ghost clings, following Jim in the bookstores on the island with his face plastered on posters, in the surf shops carrying his memoir, and most of all in the way his mother looks at him sometimes, like she’s searching for a memory that’s never going to reappear.

Jim’s first memories are of waves, rolling around him, and then of falling and seeing only hints of sky and light as a wave engulfed him. He is nothing like his father—has no natural talent for the sport, gets up in the early hours of dawn to paddle to the line-up every day—he works at it daily. His knees are beat from failing, and his skin is beet red from the sun on the first day he shows even a hint of promise. He knows that’s the moment because his mother is beaming, waving at him from shore as he glides in.

Jim is fifteen when he first gets crunched, surfing out by a reef and getting dragged under. He breaks his ankle and fractures his arm and he’s out for a month, days before the first local competition.

He watches a girl, Nyota Uhura, take the championship with ease. She interviews well, smiling when asked why she’s not currently sponsored (read: wearing bikinis and smiling for the camera)—he laughs when she bares her teeth and says, “I’m not a swimsuit model.” Leonard McCoy, who had been the local favorite, never shows at the meet.

Jim is sixteen when he formally meets McCoy, and it’s because McCoy steals a wave right out from under him like a jackass.

“Do you have eyes?” He yells at McCoy. “I was on the inside!”

“Sorry, man,” McCoy yells back, “You were so slow I figured you were asleep!”

The next time Jim sees McCoy it’s at a meet, where McCoy smokes him. Jim stares at the scoreboard and just counts his lucky stars Uhura wasn’t there to destroy him. 

—

McCoy finds the ocean comforting. Some people avoid the water, claiming to have watched one too many Shark Weeks. Others either don’t swim or can’t, or fear the power of rip currents. McCoy doesn’t fear much in the water, aside from great whites, though he certainly respects the water churning under him. He rubs at the scar on his thumb, a reminder of the sharp oysters that left him with scars up and down his legs and hands.

He watches Kirk take a perfect barrel wave with ease and glares, adjusting his grip on his board. He can’t get his head in the game, too focused on a persistent thought in his head telling him to turn out to sea and disappear. He thinks he sees a fin glide past and shudders. The sun is beating down on him, and he shuts his eyes for a minute.

“Nyota,” he yells, waiting for her to glance up. “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“The fin,” he says, glancing back at the glassy black water and seeing nothing. “Fuck, never mind.”

“You okay?” she says, looking concerned as she paddles into the line-up next to McCoy.

“Yeah, I don’t…shit I think I’m too sleep deprived to be out here,” he mutters, watching the waves warily, though nothing appears in the dark water.

“You stop sleeping again?”

“I’m fine,” he answers. “Taking my meds.”

“Are we still on for studying for AP Bio at Scotty’s at 9?”

“Yeah,” he says. He pauses, then, “I’m calling it, heading in. Kick Kirk’s ass.”

“Not everything’s a competition,” she calls after him. “But yes, I’m going to kick his ass.”

When McCoy gets home, he turns off all the lights in his room, and crawls into bed.

He wakes up later with no concept of time, feeling hungover and disoriented. He checks his watch and it’s 10pm. He rummages for his phone, finding it finally under the bed. Six missed texts and two missed calls. Nyota’s on her way to his house.

He answers the door to an extremely angry looking Uhura—she looks like she’s debating killing or hugging him, but settles for bypassing him for the cupboards. She emerges triumphant with a pop-tart and throws it at him. “Eat something. Have you been asleep since you got home?”

He nods, sitting down heavily in the chair and unwrapping the pop-tart. He runs a finger absentmindedly down the inside of his left arm, feeling the faint scars. He keeps thinking about using a blade, can practically taste the snick sound the blade makes, the blood dripping and seeping into his fingernails as he scrubs the wounds. He grimaces, taking a bite of his pop-tart.

Uhura is looking at him again, or, perhaps a more apt term would be studying him. “Kirk asked where you went,” she says, finally.

“He did? I was under the impression he hated me.”

“Well,” she said, opening the fridge door and pulling out a juice, “he either wants to kill you or screw you and my bet is on the latter.”

McCoy looks at her for a second and laughs. “Kirk needs to focus on bringing his A game Saturday, not chasing me for whatever twisted reason he’s concocted.”

“Do you really think you should be competing Saturday? You’re hallucinating and sleeping nine hours during the day…and you really, really better be taking your fucking meds.”

McCoy glared. “I’m taking them, dammit.” 

“Alright, then. Stay in one piece until tomorrow? I gotta go study for this test, I need an 89 to keep my high A.”

“Yep,” he says, standing up and grabbing his AP Bio textbook off the counter. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to open this textbook and then use it as a pillow.”

Uhura shook her head. “I’ll let myself out. Study in the morning at least!”

He closes the bedroom door, nodding slightly.


	2. now it's only you that matters, finding any way to your wild heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bones has known he was gay since he was a young teenager, but he’s not out, not like Spock, who is practically the poster child for the queer movement. Bones is terrified, fucking terrified of anyone knowing, something he attributes to his Southern upbringing where people just weren’t gay, dammit.

_Spring, Senior Year of High School_

Bones knows he’s in love with Spock when they’re both eighteen.

Spock is beaming as he comes out of the ocean, his hair plastered to his head and his swimsuit sticking to him.

Bones smiles at him, tells him what he already knows: “New fastest time.”

Spock grins, stripping off his rash guard. “I had a feeling it would be a successful swim,” he says. He slides past Bones to grab his towel.

Spock is his closest friend, after Uhura. He’s the guy who drags Bones to college fairs and buys him coffee on Wednesdays with his tutoring money. He’s the guy Bones texts at 4am when he’s bleeding. He’s the guy who gave Bones his nickname after an ill-timed joke in Anatomy class.

Bones has known he was gay since he was a young teenager, but he’s not out, not like Spock, who is practically the poster child for the queer movement. Bones is terrified, fucking terrified of anyone knowing, something he attributes to his Southern upbringing where people just weren’t gay, dammit.

Spock is the one waiting for him at the hospital with a look in his eye, and Spock is the one who goes through his house and carefully removes all his straight razors. “Call me, before you hurt yourself. For once I’d like to get a call that says you have appendicitis or something and aren’t lying in a pool of your own blood.”

Leonard nods, filing it under things likely to happen after the earth explodes.

_Freshman Year of College_

It’s 6:30pm and Leonard’s going to be disinherited any minute now.

He feels out of his skin, but time keeps sliding by. His hands are shaking, he realizes after a minute, and he clamps them together, folding them in his lap. He can’t focus on the service, but he had to go somewhere and there were no good options. Uhura is on study abroad, and Spock is somewhere, at a friend’s or something. He’s going to fucking come apart before they get back, he just—

He thought he had more time, but evidently not—someone posted a picture of Leonard in his Pride shirt and now he’s fucked. He’s fucked, because he knows, he knows his parents are on his Facebook and the asshole who took the picture won’t take it down. He can’t block his parents, that’ll just make them suspicious and then they’ll just use his sister’s account anyway.

He wants to cry or maybe take up skydiving without a parachute and it’s interesting, he can’t pick the emotions apart, they’ve bled together. He texts Spock. He texts Spock before he thinks it entirely the way through.

Leonard: I’m gay. I thought you should know before my parents and our whole town

Spock: I’m coming over. Where are you?

Leonard: Shul

Spock: meet me outside

Leonard: k

Spock picks him up in his beat-up black Chevrolet truck.

Leonard shuts the door. “I fucked up,” he says, without preamble. “I was hanging out with this guy and he had this Pride shirt I was admiring, and then he just gave it to me, dared me to wear it for a day to see how it felt. So, I wore it to my history class and some homophobe snapped a picture of it and posted it online and he tagged me, because he’s a dick. Tagged it, ‘liberals taking over my school.’”

Spock gets a look on his face. “Who is this guy?”

“The guy I was hanging out with? Andy Greenblatt, remember, from the Mid-Atlantic Chap-”

“No, the homophobe, who is he?”

“Doesn’t matter, you don’t know him,” Bones says, dejectedly, leaning back against the passenger seat. “I’m fucked, Spock. They’re going to know and then I’m disowned.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“Spock,” Bones says, patiently. “My parents cut off my uncle. He was their best man and they just cut him out,” he snaps his fingers, “like that.”

“That’s the goy side of the family, isn’t it,” Spock says, a little viciously.

“Yeah,” Bones says. “My dad’s side, the evangelicals. My mom—I don’t know how she’ll react. She cut him off too but he’s not her brother, you know? But she was raised Conservative and sometimes…I don’t know.”

Spock looks at him, and suddenly he’s leaning over Bones, his hands on Bones’ shoulders. “Tell me if this is okay,” he says, quietly.

Bones nods, thinking, whatever Spock wants isn’t going to hurt me, and then they’re kissing, slow, like the end of a Western, then Spock is in his lap and licking his way into his mouth and Bones is just gone. He grips the arm rest, his knuckles turning white, as Spock grips the back of his neck and sighs into his mouth. Bones has never been this close to Spock before and he can smell his cologne and he’s close enough to lick the clean-smelling sweat from his neck (did he just come from a shower?) and he’s going to die if Spock doesn’t touch him.

Spock has his hands under Bones’ shirt and he’s touching skin and Bones is shaking, a little, but his eyes roll back when Spock’s hand starts to venture lower.

“No,” he gasps, moving Spock’s hands back. “Above the waist.” he clarifies, relaxing again as Spock nods and adjusts his hands.

“I should have asked,” he says into Bones’ ear, and bites.

Bones shudders. “Spock…” he says.

“Yes?”

“We’re in the parking lot of shul.”

“Hashem doesn’t mind,” Spock says, grinning, biting his ear again. “She’s watching.”

“Fuck, that’s creepy,” Bones breathes, as Spock puts his full weight on him, reclining the seat with his free hand. “That’s good,” he mutters when Spock grasps his wrists and maneuvers them above his head, going back to kissing him. Spock’s nails are digging into his wrists and he can feel Spock’s belt buckle pressing into his stomach and Bones is biting into his lip so hard he’s tasting blood, it’s not enough and way, way too much at the same time. Spock rolls them so Bones is facedown, and Spock’s running fingers up under his shirt and twisting his nipple and Bones is going to break the fucking seat or something.

Spock moves off him about as suddenly as he moved on him, sitting up and climbing back to his original seat.

“Fuck,” Bones says, because he’s not sure what else to say.

Spock puts the truck in gear. “We’ll go to my place,” he says, not looking at Bones.

Bones nods, struck speechless for what very well may be the first time in his life.


	3. how does it feel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a Monday morning when he literally runs into Jim Kirk who’s coming out of the Registrar’s Office.
> 
> “You?” he says, a little dumfounded. Last he heard, Jim was on full scholarship at UC-Santa Barbara. But now he’s here.
> 
> Jim smiles at him, tips his baseball cap. “Just transferred!” he’s looking Bones up and down in a friendly, but slightly unnerving, way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter discusses the Holocaust. Bones in this story is a History major specializing in Jewish studies.

In the end, he does get unceremoniously disowned and it’s via third party, an apologetic and lengthy conversation with his sister. She tells him she loves him, but it feels hollow. He hangs up wondering what he really has to show for the first year of college.

Well. He does have Spock, which.

Spock is like the Shema, warm and comfortable and he thinks maybe _he’s_ like Oseh Shalom, deafening and fast and all over the place. Spock doesn’t understand his deep need to be in shul every Friday night, he’s always saying he can bring in the Shabbos all on his own in his house. But Bones, well, he drags himself to shul without fail, even that one time he had the flu and had to wear a mask and nearly sent Spock into a conniption fit. “Bones, you’re going to die, and then I’m _going to have to go to temple_  and kill you all over again.”

Bones wears his Judaism on his sleeve because he would rather someone hate him off the bat than pretend to be his friend for six months and then spit in his face. He is consistently annoyed by the people who attend his college, and wears his BBYO and Birthright shirts and his Star of David with pride and not a little bit of anger. Bones speaks up in his classes about Zionism, about antisemitism, about the insidiousness of Nazism, and Bones gets harassed for it, finds flyers from the BDS group plastered on his dorm room door and once, on a notable occasion, a swastika drawn on his textbook. He gets both the infamous, “But you don’t look Jewish,” and the, “Can you Jews ever stop talking about the Holocaust?” He wants a fucking medal for not locking his entire class in a room and forcing them to watch footage from the Holocaust so they can understand why, no, he cannot stop talking about the Holocaust, not unless they can bring back his people, who they pushed to the brink of extermination. Some nights he closes his eyes and sees nothing but death and it’s not his normal, easy relationship with death—not nooses in his hometown backyard—it’s people burning alive, screaming. It's children being led to their deaths and it's women and men his own age shot point blank, it's entire villages just vanishing off the map. It's the stuff of Bones' worst nightmares and at the same time it's his not a nightmare, it happened, it happened to his relatives, to whole nations. 

He switches his major to history and confines his outrage (mostly) to papers where he works to destroy the image of the Allies as the savior (such a goyim term) of the Jews. He writes about Catholics stealing Jewish babies, about Poland’s pogroms _after the fucking war,_ about Jewish and Romani persecution, about Jews who blew up train tracks during the war and hunted Nazis after it. He listens to tapes of Holocaust speakers recounting their lives and he looks at pictures, where he can control his reaction. He remembers his professor showing images of dead Jews in mass graves and just getting up and leaving. He understands, he gets it, you must show goyim the devastation or they just _don’t care_ about Jews being murdered but he wants a warning, next time, when they show people who could be his relatives, when they show the results of a genocidal regime trying to burn his people to the ground. 

Spock has three out of five classes with him, which he’s glad of, because Spock is the only person who can reign him in before he goes postal on another girl who’s “just saying but don’t you think Jews should have fought back? Maybe if they had guns?”

After Bones is disowned, they sit next to each other in class in the back and Spock will message him and if it’s dark, they’ll hold hands and Bones feels less like his life is spinning out of control.

They make out in the bathroom after class, in the car, on the roof on rare occasions. 

It’s all going great. They’re on campus for summer classes, taking one or two history courses.

It’s a Monday morning when he literally runs into Jim Kirk who’s coming out of the Registrar’s Office.

“You?” he says, a little dumfounded. Last he heard, Jim was on full scholarship at UC-Santa Barbara. But now he’s here.

Jim smiles at him, tips his baseball cap. “Just transferred!” he’s looking Bones up and down in a friendly, but slightly unnerving, way.

Bones smiles back, no teeth. 

Jim, unfazed, is still talking. “Here, gimme your phone,” he says, “I’ll put my number in, we should catch up! People from our hometown need to stick together!” And before Bones knows what hit him, he’s got Jim’s number and he’s left standing there, feeling like a tornado just hit him. 

“Jim fucking Kirk,” he muttered, shaking his head, watching Jim practically bounce off into the distance.


	4. Interlude 1: gonna make tonight a show

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Or maybe he's getting fucked on the counter next to the cherry milkshakes and slick retro napkin holders and the ketchup stains and maybe some of the girls are watching, grinning with bared teeth and some of them are kissing, and some of them look like Uhura and Gaila with hands down their skirts and eyes on him, he’s the accelerant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Individual warnings: suicidal actions, violence, not very graphic (but evident) depiction of rape, semi-graphic depiction of sex, nsfw in general. Think Mirrorverse.

The sunset is pink but violent, like cotton candy dying on the skyline. He likes to be poetic about the sunsets, and there’s no place they can be more beautiful than here, on the bridge to the island. 

Bones is sitting on the dock, dangling his legs, when he sees the body floating. 

The body has been ravaged by salt, by sea, by fish, but he recognizes the tattoos, if nothing else. The skin is peeled like an orange. 

He leans in closer, feeling the water splashing at his chest and arms. He doesn’t extend an arm, though, it’s too late for that.

He’s leaning forward when he sees the eyes, and they’re open, burning, taking him down into the waves.

He jumps back, but he’s slipping off the abyss, falling, and he’s crushed, crushed under the waves and he can’t catch his breath, too busy flailing at the surface and then it’s over.

He realizes something isn't right when he wakes up, in a carpeted hallway with no lights with his wrists open to the vein and he’s saying something in Yiddish over and over again and he’s 

aware of nothing, then the huff of hot breath on his neck and something tightening on his wrists, holding skin together with string. Bones blinks, and he’s not alone, anymore, there’s a belt and hands and a crack of pain and then he’s coughing and straining because someone’s got their hands all over him and they didn’t negotiate this and he doesn’t  _understand._

He’s covered in blood but he gets himself to his apartment. He checks the time and there’s no numbers on the clock and there are eyes in the fucking walls.

He finds Spock dead on the floor, spread-eagle and he sees the eyes on the walls, they’re pasted on.

He understands, now. It was Spock all along, on the beach, in the sea, and beneath the waves, and Spock keeps  _drowning him._

He blinks and he’s at a drive-in and Jim is grinning at him and then he’s pulling him into the bathroom. Jim’s using lube he had in his pocket to finger Bones in the damn bathroom with twenty people outside and then he’s got his hands pinning Bones and he’s inside _,_ thrusting so that he’s making Bones claw against the bathroom walls, biting his forearm so he doesn’t scream for the whole theater. His face is against the wall and Jim doesn’t look him in the eyes, just grinds against him and touches his dick and does everything Bones asked him so nicely to never, never do.  _Spock,_  he bites out, fighting Jim’s hold, but Jim slaps him across the face and then he can _see,_ sees Spock, bloody, on the floor.

Jim is grinning brightly he sees from the corner of his eye, which is freely bleeding and now he’s tasting the blood, and then Jim’s stepping aside and letting people past and this isn’t right, he doesn’t do this but here he is, letting men fuck him like it’s nothing, getting fucked bareback in the bathroom. Or maybe he's getting fucked on the counter next to the cherry milkshakes and slick retro napkin holders and the ketchup stains and maybe some of the girls are watching, grinning with bared teeth and some of them are kissing, and some of them look like Uhura and Gaila with hands down their skirts and eyes on him, he’s the accelerant. He’s the attraction, laid bare on the counter while men fuck him with all their clothes on, belts scratching his skin and their bright white teeth stripping him down to the bone.

Everyone can see him and they’re all staring but no one makes eye contact with him, only with the men over him, pinning him down and making him an object, not fit for human interaction, and he  _loves it._  There’s something not right, he thinks, as the man to his left starts gnawing on his finger. The man on his right takes a knife to his thigh and then he thinks, _oh, t_ _his is fine._

It’s only when the blood is all he sees that he starts to panic and thrash. Jim tells him he’s about to die, quiet and certain, levels a gun at his heart. Bones doesn't protest certainty, so he looks him in the eyes as the blackness overtakes him until he can’t see Spock, not anymore.

He wakes up with water in his lungs and a sense of foreboding. Whenever he wakes up, details sluice away like water evaporating. But he knows, in the pit of his stomach, that once something is in motion, there’s no putting the brakes back on, and something, something is not right. 

   


End file.
